We All Need Mirrors to Remind Ourselves Who We Are

What's coming through is alive.

What's holding up is a mirror.

But what's singing songs is a snake

Looking to turn my piss to wine.

If there is a mirror, I will more than likely look. I want to make sure I'm there, I want to see what's changed since the last time--or is it, that I want to note continuity, I want to make sure that I see the same thing on this glass surface that I saw on that glass surface. I am vain and self-involved, I twist and pose, adjusting the image until I see in my reflection, a close enough representation of what I want to see.

From moment to moment, paranoid I have disappeared or physically altered between glances, I crave to see myself--over and over, desperately through as many surfaces as I can stretch my body over simultaneously. I want to witness the moment I change--I want to direct and act; i want to edit myself, steer away any unfavorable second that introduces an alien interpretation. An ideal self has been programmed into my perspective; and to find anything foreign to that direction is to detect a harmful bacteria in the body of Identity.

What is this self-obsession? Beyond self-value and confidence, its the worship of insecurity. And what happens when mirrors stop being glass? Surely as all obsessions escalate--and certainly as the obsession itself is for reflection not reflective surfaces, new methods of seeing oneself come into practice. What are friends? When made to bounce your personality onto them and back to you? When they indirectly manipulate your identity in ways, favorable to you--When through them you become as you want to be known. What are expressions of writing, painting, music, and film, dance and invention--mirrors. We place them up high for all to see, but especially ourselves. As soon as we build the frame and marry the glass into its cage, we fall right into the assurance of existence. The immeasurable welcome of a self-modeled, self-promised portrait. By a near perfect painter and with the final glaze of a bias perspective, that of our own.